Future

Peter Leithart writes about one of the symbolic undertones of the ritual of circumcision:

This also highlights the fact that circumcision is the beginning of a pedagogy of weakness, of renunciation of fleshly achievement, of renunciation of the future. If circumcision is a symbolic sacrifice of a newborn son, it is a symbolic offering of the future of your name and family to Yahweh. If Yahweh chooses to raise your son from the dead, then you have a future. But the act entrusts the future into Yahweh hands, which is of course where the future always lies anyway.

The ritual of baptism is the reverse of this in some ways; it is actually our induction into a future that has already begun:

[God] saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5)

In baptism we are joined to Jesus, who has completed the exodus into the new creation (Luke 9:31) and reigns seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Even now we reign with him (Ephesians 2:6). We must still suffer and sacrifice as we look towards the full arrival of this future, and we must still entrust it to God (Ephesians 2:7), but in baptism there is a much greater emphasis on the future’s present arrival in Jesus, and on the church’s participation with him in not just announcing, but actually living out, the kingdom of the new creation.